File structure explained

Django's own tutorial does a good job of explaining the basic structure of a Django project. If you haven't worked in Django before, it is well worth a read. In this file, I want to detail some important folders and files in the django-app directory for developers.

app directory

This is an important directory as it contains all the central Django files, most centrally settings.py, which defined a lot of the project's basic set-up, such as which apps are installed.

settings.py file

Importantly, the settings.py file contains the algorithm that reads in the SECRET_KEY environment variable (with the backup solution of reading it from the file).

It also contains the DEBUG setting, which should be turned to False but is currently (in our alpha-dev stage) still set to True, which exposes us to some security risks.

It also contains the TEMPLATES['DIRS] variable, which ensures that all our templates can be located in the templates directory in the root of the repository.

The settings.py file is also what defines the MySQL settings, once we want to move ahead with setting mySQL as the backend database solution rather than the sqlite file that currently serves as our database.

This is also where you'll find the STATICFILE_DIRS